


Ever Higher

by astolat



Category: The Martian - Andy Weir, Top Gun (1986)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Fusion, M/M, Mars, Outer Space
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-17
Updated: 2015-12-17
Packaged: 2018-05-07 07:42:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,468
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5448671
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/astolat/pseuds/astolat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Maybe he wouldn’t have thought of it on his own, but soon as he’d heard about it—well, it was fucking obvious, wasn’t it? There was no other way to keep climbing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ever Higher

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fourfreedoms](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fourfreedoms/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide, fourfreedoms! I hope you enjoy (and I hope you don't mind the unexpected AU! I don't really know where the idea came from but it grabbed on and wouldn't let go.)

“Shit! Shit, shit,  _shit!_ ” Maverick kept cursing as loud as he could. It didn’t show any signs of waking Iceman up, but it made him feel better anyway. It wasn’t that hard to manage the dead weight, since Iceman was still clocking in under a hundred pounds right now even with gear, but the red dust was flying directly in his face, tiny little pinging noises against the faceplate—cheery sounding, like windchimes, Christ—and he only could hope he was going vaguely in the right direction. The high beam from the rover behind him was already scattered too much to follow the light.

Then the dust thinned out, and a couple steps later the sheer wall of rock was looming up in front of him. He stopped and tried to guess whether he’d drifted right or left, picked right, and after another couple minutes he found the dark spot that had shown up on the rover’s scanner, and thank fuck it was an actual crevasse and not just quartz or some other shit.

He let Iceman slide off his shoulders, feet first, tipped him into the opening and settled him to the ground. The suit monitors were still green, except the low oxygen warning, and the duct tape patch over the faceplate seemed to be holding, so that was fucking something. Maverick straightened up and looked back out. He’d thought about going back for more supplies, but the dust was a solid wall, no sign of the rover’s light.

He dumped the rest of the gear into the crevasse: oxygen tank, battery, first aid, survival kit, atmosphere generator, the dozen other things he’d grabbed. Air first. The survival kit had a big roll of NASA’s fancy high-density clingtarp. He duct-taped it in stripes all across the opening and tacked up over their heads until he’d sealed them up inside the stone. He shoved the generator’s pressure tube through, then he got the silicone spray and went over the whole edge and around the tube. He checked the instructions: they hadn’t practiced this that often, only about twenty times or so. It wasn’t one of the things that you were supposed to need. Two layers of sealant, and you had to wait fifteen minutes in between each layer. He thumped down on his ass to wait. “What the fuck am I even doing here?” he said. He wanted to pace, or punch a wall, or be on something moving two hundred miles an hour, not down here in the dark and the dust, getting buried alive. “Christ. I’m a fucking pilot, I’m not even supposed to be on the fucking ground.”

“Fuck you, Maverick,” Iceman muttered faintly, staticky voice in the helmet radio like a ghost talking in his ear. “You’re here because you still can’t quit trying to keep up with me.”

“Fuck off,” Maverick said, his voice breaking on it. He wanted to throw up, his throat tight. He’d known Iceman was dead, dying; he’d _known_ it, known he was dragging another dead body with him away from another wreck, another weight that was going to be pulling on him the rest of his life.

Iceman pushed himself up sitting with a couple of jerky moves. “What happened?”

“You drove off a cliff, dickhead,” Maverick said.

It wasn’t easy to glare murder through two faceplates in the light of a single LED, but Iceman managed it. “I did not drive off a cliff,” he said, biting off every word.

“Yeah, tell it to the rover.” Maverick stood up and started the second layer of sealant. His hands didn’t shake, his hands never shook, but his stomach churned steadily. He didn’t look back until he’d gotten it done. He chucked the tube into the box of gear and got the tube hooked up to the battery, and attached the oxygen tank. He crouched down watching the monitors, waiting for the air to get breathable.

Iceman had waited the whole time, silently. “Maverick. What happened?”

“We hit some kind of sinkhole,” he said. “A dust bowl, maybe. The rover’s front end tipped down, went straight into solid rock. The hull breached. Lost the front drive train, secondary power, long-range comms, and probably about half your brains.”

“At least I’m still ahead of you in that department, then,” Ice said. The monitor flipped to amber. He unlatched the base of his helmet and worked it off, turning it around in his hands to look at the patched crack running up and down the whole left side of the faceplate. Maverick got his off, too. The air tasted wrong in a slightly different way, but it was getting better. Iceman looked out of the crevasse. The red clouds on the other side of the tarp were heading fast for black. “How long ago?”

Maverick didn’t have a clue. Air howling out of the front windshield, blood spattered across the dashboard, the rover rocking around him and half the warning alarms going off at once, Christmas lighting up across the board. It had been like being in a dogfight: time didn’t move the same way, a different kind of relativity. The clock on the generator said it had been twenty-three minutes, all told.

He tugged off the suit gloves and took the first aid kit over. Iceman followed his finger around and flipped him off when Maverick held up the middle finger and said, “How many?”

The crusted line of blood ran along a raised lump almost from his temple down to his jaw. It looked swollen and darker than the surrounding skin in the thin light. No fucking clue what being on Mars would do to a concussion. Maybe someone would write a goddamn paper about it.

“It’s not the concussion that’s going to kill me,” Iceman said.

“We’re fine. My suit’s got eight hours, there’s still an hour left in yours. We have a full tank, that gets us to twenty-nine hours.”

“Best-case scenario, this thing will take a week to blow itself out before they can possibly find us. This isn’t a survivable situation. Not for two people. If that crash had taken me out—”

“Fuck you,” Maverick said, too sincerely, and saw Iceman notice. Not more than a lift of an eyebrow, but he noticed.

“You okay, Mitchell?”

“Just shut up,” Maverick said. He stuffed the leftover gauze back into the kit without trying to keep it neat, then stuffed himself into the corner, as far away from Ice as he could get. It wasn’t all that far, since the whole crevasse was maybe four feet across. He pulled his knees up as best he could in the suit and stared out at the dust storm. Bullshit he’d been trying to keep up. Maybe he wouldn’t have thought of it on his own, but soon as he’d heard about it—

_So what’s Iceman up to these days?_

_He went back to grad school. He’s getting a PhD in geology._

_Are you shitting me?_

_Nah. Don’t you get it? He’s going for it, man. NASA._

—well, it was fucking obvious, wasn’t it? There was no other way to keep climbing. He’d dusted off his mech engineering degree and put in his application—first time in his life he’d been glad he’d never broken five-foot-seven. And okay, sure, it had been good, having the old rivalry back. He _liked_ chasing Iceman. It made things more fun when you could give somebody else a little shit while you were taking it by the truckload from the instructors. Just like the old days. Just like the old days.

“Anyway, this is a hell of a time for you to start panicking,” Maverick said. “I’ve got the beacon receiver, and the spare tank is hooked up in the rover. When morning comes, we’ll get it, we’ll walk back. We didn’t get that far, we can make it. Twelve hours, easy.”

It had worked for both of them. A year into training, everyone knew they were both going. It hadn’t even been a question.

Iceman didn’t answer him right away. He was looking out at the storm, his arms resting on his knees, loose clasp of one hand around the other wrist. He didn’t look like he was panicking. He mostly never looked like he was feeling anything, though.

“There isn’t an hour left in my suit,” he said, voice calm, steady, like he wasn’t saying anything that mattered.

“What?” Maverick said.

“I’m down to dregs, and the CO2 filters are all full. The suit’s compromised.”

Maverick jerked his head away. His breath was coming hard, like somebody had bricked up half his throat. He licked his lips. “Fine,” he said, finally. “We just have to camp out, then. When it eases up, I’ll go back to the rover, swap around the oxygen tank and the battery—”

“Uh huh. Where’s the water coming from?” Ice said.

“Jesus, Kazansky, do you need me to wipe your ass for you, too? We’ll piss in a bag, I’ll dump it in the reclaimer while I’m over there.”

Ice sighed, like the universe was demanding too much from his patience. “And how many rounds do you think that’s going to work? In this storm, the solar panels won’t be able to charge for shit.”

“So what do you fucking want to do?” Maverick yelled.

“As soon as we get a clear patch, I want you to head back to the rover and take the spare tank.”

“What the fuck was I just saying?” Mav said, and then he got the idea. “Oh, fuck you.”

“Our best chance is if you can get close enough to base to send a distress signal, so they know where we are. Then you can come back. You leave me this tank, seal up the tarp. I’ll be fine.”

“Bullshit. You’ll be _dead_ ,” Mav said.

“Better than both of us,” Iceman said.

“I’m not going anywhere.”

“If we don’t get a signal out, if we both die here without a message, they’re going to try to come find us anyway. You know they are. Half of them are fucking civilians, they’re all going to want another feel-good happy ending like Watney making it back home.  But they don’t know where we are, they’ll be driving into the storm blind. They won’t find us, and they’ll keep looking, and they’ll push it.”

“Are you done with this bullshit?” Mav said. “Because I’m done.”

“For fuck’s sake, Mitchell.” Iceman had the gall to look annoyed. “I’d go.”

“Because you’re a stone-cold frozen son of a bitch, right?”

“Because it’s the only thing that makes sense!”

Maverick stretched his legs out, crossed them at the ankles, and dropped his chin to his chest and pretended to be sleeping.

“Dickhead,” Iceman muttered.

Maverick did fall asleep for a while: they’d been up for eighteen hours by then. He came awake when Iceman kicked his boot: outside the storm had thinned a little, wind changing direction maybe. The rover’s light glittered like a faint star in the distance, pink with the whirling dust. Mav checked the oxygen tank: six hours gone. “Okay,” he said. “I’m going to try and rig a line to the rover so I can walk it even if the storm picks up again.”

“Goddammit, Maverick, listen to me,” Iceman said, sharp. His face was tight, cheekbones throwing hard shadows into his eyes. “You don’t get to save me this time, do you understand? You only get to die with me, and maybe take half the crew along with us.”

“Shut up before I punch you in the face,” Mav said. “I’ll get the distress signal turned on if I can.”

It was a little easier, going back. The rover was still lying tipped forward onto its nose like a half-flipped turtle, or maybe some kind of giant Martian fossil coming out of the sand, rear wheels up in the air. Only the light made it look alive. Maverick hauled himself up inside.

The power levels were reading less than 20%. The comms were completely shot. He didn’t look at the dash again, just went to work. Another piece of tarp to cover the gaping windshield, so the rover wouldn’t lose so much heat; that would keep the electronics from dying for a little longer. He took the battery, took the tank. He went back out and swept off the solar panels: wouldn’t last until morning, probably, but better than nothing. There was plenty of cabling to rip out of the rover’s engine. It was never going anywhere again. He knotted it to the undercarriage and paid it out trudging back to the crevasse, and weighted it down with some rocks on the other end.

They’d put up a second tarp on the inside, a poor man’s airlock. Iceman had got a ziplock seal put into it, about half-height, but cycling through was still a real pain in the ass. Maverick got through the outer tarp and sealed it back up again, then Iceman opened the second one from the inside and Maverick shoved everything in. Iceman swapped in the battery and tank, shoved the old ones out and zipped the inner tarp back up. Maverick opened the outer tarp again, lugged the old ones to the rover, plugged them in to refill. Then it was back to the crevasse, open the outer tarp, two rounds to seal it back up, sitting in the one-foot crawl space until it cured and Ice could unzip and let him crawl through. 

“Hi honey, I’m home,” he said, when he got his helmet off. “Miss me?”

“Like the hole in my head,” Iceman said, dry.

They split a ration and drank up the rest of the water. “Of all the times I’ve been pissed off that NASA wouldn’t let us bring any booze,” Mav said.

“Yeah, first DUI on Mars, that would’ve been you,” Iceman said.

“Says the guy who drove us off a cliff,” Maverick said.

He’d brought back a tablet. After they ate, Ice took it and started writing up a report, like there was something useful to be conveyed out of this situation. Don’t drive into a giant fucking hole. Don’t get your suit fucked up. Pretty basic shit, really, there wasn’t much you could do for some asshole who couldn’t manage that much. Maverick clenched his fists up and stared out at the storm, wind muffled now behind the two tarps.

“You need to top off your suit,” Iceman said, still bent over the tablet.

“I swear to God, you fucking start in on this again—”

“No, I’ve registered that you’re determined to be a fucking moron for the moment,” Iceman said. “But when the tanks run out—”

“Then I’ll hook up my suit,” Maverick said.

“It won’t work,” Iceman said. “The atmosphere generator needs pure oxygen. The suit’s air supply is already mixed. You could pump air into another suit, but you can’t feed it to the generator.”

“I can fucking try,” Mav said.

“Fine, go ahead,” Iceman said. Mav stared at him. “Try it. It won’t take you more than five minutes, we’ve got enough air in here to breathe for at least fifteen. You might as well find out now instead of after the rest of the air is gone.”

He kept working on his report while Maverick rigged it up. It took less than five minutes. The valves all fit easily, the same standard size, same tubing; but as soon as he switched the generator back on, all the warning lights came up red. Nothing came out of the vent. Maverick stayed bent over it, fists resting on the console, trying to think of something, anything.

“When the tanks run out,” Iceman said, like he hadn’t even been interrupted, “if your suit’s full, you might still make it back. Top it off.”

“Fuck you,” Maverick managed.

“You want to sit in here with my bloated corpse until your suit runs out, you can do that too,” Iceman said. “I’m hoping maybe you’ll stop acting like an asshole once I’m not around anymore and you have to quit trying to impress me.”

He couldn’t just say _fuck you_ again, so he grabbed the tablet out of Iceman’s hands— _Mom, if you get this_ the first words at the top of the screen, and Maverick wanted to smash it, wanted to throw it hard, but instead he put it down and grabbed Ice and shoved him up against the rock—

“Goddammit, Maverick!” Iceman grabbed him back, glaring at him ice blue and hard, his mouth pressed tight and his teeth clenched behind it, and fuck him, fuck the bastard, he couldn’t hide it that well; he was scared. He was _scared_ , and he was scared because that cold ticking machine inside his skull had looked at the scenario and seen every angle and run through all the moves, and there wasn’t a way out. Maverick clenched his fists against Iceman’s shoulders, sick to his stomach. Jesus, he should’ve gone, he should’ve left. He could have died somewhere out there in the dust with Iceman still alive behind him, instead of sitting here waiting to watch him choke to death.

It hit him, he’d known Iceman longer now than he’d known Goose. They’d barely been more than kids, back at Top Gun. Goose’s kid was graduating high school three weeks from now, headed for the Naval Academy. Mav had promised to send him a congratulations video from Mars, since he couldn’t be there.

“Maverick,” Iceman said, quieter, and put his big hand around the side of Mav’s head. Twelve years, seven months—he couldn’t figure out the days, he couldn’t remember what fucking day Top Gun had started or even what fucking day it was today. Hours and minutes ticking away now in the hiss of the air out of the tank. Whatever was left in here, however much air the rover could pump into the last tank before it died out there in the dark. Maybe they had twenty, maybe they had thirty.

“No,” he said. “No.”

“Mav,” Iceman said.

“We hook up the suits on a long line,” Maverick said. “We’ll just seal yours up around it, the whole thing. Plaster it with tarp and duct tape, whatever, get it airtight, that’s all we need. We take the tanks, take the battery, hook them to my suit—”

“You want to walk twelve hours through a dust storm on a fucking tether,” Iceman said after a moment, but his hand had tightened, and he only meant it the way he always meant it, _Maverick, you’re dangerous, you’re crazy._

“Yeah, that’s right.” So fucking what if they fell over, if the tether ripped out of their suits. They’d both be dead in less than five minutes, together, and his heart could fucking start beating again, he could breathe again. He was grinning, helplessly.

“Christ,” Iceman said, that almost-smile cracking out on his face. “You’re such a dick.”

“Come on, Kazansky, admit it,” Maverick said, grinning wider. “You _are_ impressed with me.”

Iceman snorted. “Yeah, I’m _something_.” He looked away, shook his head a little, still smiling, and _holy shit_ , he was, he really was, and why the fuck hadn’t he ever—right, because it wasn’t the right time, it wasn’t the right place, it was against fucking regulations and a bad idea on top of it, so of course Iceman hadn’t even let it _show_.

“Oh, you asshole,” Maverick said, wonderingly.

Iceman turned back, saw his face. His hand tightened. “Maverick, this isn’t—”

“I’m going to kick the shit out of you,” Maverick said, and dragged him in and kissed him.

Iceman stayed tense and still a moment, and then he kissed back like letting down the floodgates, gripping him hard, crushing the breath out of him better than pulling ten Gs. Maverick gasped for air and kissed him again, sweet adrenaline rush hitting right where he wanted it, God. Iceman’s hair was spiky with sweat under his fingers, his shoulders were wide and hard as solid rock. His hands were tight on Mav’s hips, holding him—he was leaning in, arching him backwards, oh _fuck_ , oh _yes_ , thigh shoving between his legs like he was going to take Maverick down and make him spread them. Jesus, Maverick was _going_ to spread them for him.

The suits, they made you practice a thousand times, in the dark, backwards, upside down, underwater. He could get one open in his sleep.

Iceman groaned and stopped kissing him, tried to hold him off. “Goddammit, Maverick. See, _this_ is why—Maverick, we don’t have the time!”

“Shut up, Kazansky,” Maverick said. “We might die or we might not, but either way—fuck Mark Watney, we’re going to be the first people to make it on Mars.”


End file.
